Planet Telex

one evening at rak

Most of The Bends was already written when the band reached RAK. This one was written and recorded there, in a single evening, and John Leckie has said it was the only song on the album that was never rehearsed.

It started from a drum loop cut out of another song, the B-side “Killer Cars”, looped on the computer rather than played again by Phil Selway. Piano went over the top, run through a stack of delays. The band had been out to dinner.

The band don't really drink but one night we went to a restaurant

john leckie · classic pop, 17 december 2022

They came back with a few bottles of wine inside them and made the song up. Yorke sang it drunk, slumped in a corner; the 2003 page has him lying down. Leckie, to Mac Randall, said they had the whole thing finished inside a couple of hours, and that it was refreshing and fun.

It was called “Planet Xerox” until the band were refused permission to use the trademark.

track one

It opens the album. Randall, in Guitar World, lists what you hear in the first few seconds: Roland Space Echo whooshes, reverberating piano chords, then the drums crashing in. Jazz Monroe in NME singled out its buzzsaw shudders. Like most of the record it was mixed by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie.

The words are a list of things you can try to do to something (force it, taste it, crush it) without it going away, and a chorus that decides everything and everyone is broken. It ends on a question repeated three times, about why you cannot forget. For a song sung horizontal it is fairly sharp.

Thirty-one years on, Ed O'Brien still pointed at it. Talking to Uncut in 2026, he gave it as his example of how much wider The Bends was than Pablo Honey.

the remixes

It came out ahead of the album, on 27 February 1995, as a double A-side with “High and Dry”; on CD2 it was the lead track. It was also the one that got remixed. Steve Osborne's Hexidecimal Mix was on CD1 and the 12-inch, which added a Hexidecimal Dub; CD2 carried the L.F.O. JD Mix; a promotional 12-inch had a Trashed Mix as well. Later that year U.N.K.L.E.'s Karma Sunra mix went on the first CD of “Just”, with a live “Planet Telex” on the second. The 2003 page called it the most remixed song the band had.

In 1996 Addicted To Noise asked whether the next album would be as experimental as the B-side remix of “Planet Telex”. Jonny Greenwood said it would be experimental, but nothing like that.

[It will be] weirder than anything else.

jonny greenwood · addicted to noise, 1996

still opening

First played at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid on 5 May 1994, the same night as “High and Dry”, and twice that year. Then seventy-three nights in 1995, twenty-six in 1996, sixty-seven in 1997 and thirty-one in 1998, which is the album tour and the OK Computer tour carrying it between them.

It never really left the set. Six nights in 2000, six in 2004, seven in 2006, fifteen in 2008, seventeen in 2012. Phil Selway, asked about the old songs in 2015, named it first among the ones that still worked in the 2012 set. Four in 2016, and one in 2017 at the Santa Barbara Bowl on 11 April.

That was followed by 3,130 days off, until the Movistar Arena in Madrid on 5 November 2025. It was played ten times on that tour, the last at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen on 15 December 2025. Two hundred and sixty-six nights, seventeen of them as the opener, five as the closer.